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Degrees of Change: The Historiography of Women’s Higher Education in England and Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2026

Jane Martin Open the ORCID record for Jane Martin [Opens in a new window]  and
Judith Harford Open the ORCID record for Judith Harford [Opens in a new window]
Jane Martin*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham, UK
Judith Harford
Affiliation:
University College Dublin, Ireland
*
Corresponding author: Judith Harford; Email: judith.harford@ucd.ie
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Abstract

This article traces the contours of the history of women’s education in England and Ireland in the period 1850-2000, mapping dominant themes and key inflection points. Positing a framework for reading degrees of change over time, we propose four interrelated lenses: access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks. Drawing on key contributions to the field, we argue that women’s engagement with higher education has followed a complex and uneven trajectory, reflective of the shifting sands of attitudes and accommodations toward women across time, space, and discipline.

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History of Education Quarterly , First View , pp. 1 - 11
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of History of Education Society.

Positing a Framework for Reading Degrees of Change over Time

The narrative of women’s engagement with higher education has not been a linear one; rather, it is a contested, temporal narrative reflective of the shifting contours of inclusion and exclusion across time, space, and discipline. In interrogating these contours, we advance a framework for reading degrees of change over time, one that foregrounds the contingent and negotiated nature of women’s experiences of higher education. Scaffolded across four analytical lenses—access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks—each lens functions as a heuristic device. Collectively, these lenses enable us to disentangle the complex interplay between structural constraints and the exercise of individual or collective agency, while also drawing attention to the ways in which scholarship itself has mapped, interpreted, and reinterpreted these dynamics.

The Emergence of a Field

A position now close to axiomatic is that the emergence of women’s history as an academic discipline was bound up with a notion of emancipation. In England, for example, plans for the first National Women’s Liberation Conference, which met in 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford, emerged from the History Workshop milieu, where Sheila Rowbotham’s comment on the need for a focus on women’s history drew a dismissive response from some of the men present. Pioneers such as Sally Alexander (whom Keira Knightley portrayed in the 2020 film Misbehaviour about the protest at that year’s Miss World contest), Anna Davin, Catherine Hall, and Rowbotham decided to organize their own event, which became this wider conference.Footnote 1 Also worth mentioning in this respect is the not wholly exceptional response from Alexander’s dissertation tutor to her proposal to study the Industrial Revolution through women’s eyes. “Interesting stuff, but don’t let it draw you into a cul-de-sac, academically speaking. Your subject needs to have genuine relevance. Best to steer clear of minority interests,” he advised.Footnote 2

When it came to gendering the story of English education, Carol Dyhouse led the field of study with the influential Girls Growing Up in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England (1981), which showed that gender was not insignificant when it came to the making of policy and practice. Building on this work, Dyhouse’s No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939 (1995) mapped and explained how women navigated higher education within a system that, while formally opening doors, maintained implicit biases through gendered expectations and social constraints.Footnote 3 June Purvis also played a pivotal role as architect of the Women’s History Network (1991) and founding editor of the journals Gender and Education (1989) and Women’s History Review (1992).

Felicity Hunt’s Lessons for Life, published in 1987, was a formative study that examined formal schooling from elementary to university levels through the lens of gender. Individual contributions to this edited collection showed the ways in which formal school structures and informal influences of socialization both reflected and reinforced prevailing social practices. The final chapter on the experience of pioneer women students at Cambridge signaled a tendency for earlier historians of women’s education to concentrate their attention on the schooling of the middle classes and on single-sex educational settings.Footnote 4 Reflecting wider trends, an enduring image emerged of a small but vocal group of activists spearheading campaigns for separate schools and colleges with the fight for women’s education seen as the first step toward paid work and political citizenship, notwithstanding calls to think more critically about gender as a relational category of analysis.Footnote 5

Also in 1987, the Irish historian Mary Cullen broke new ground with the landmark publication Girls Don’t Do Honours, in which she noted that “education has always been a primary concern for feminists.”Footnote 6 The establishment of the Women’s History Association of Ireland in 1989, of which Cullen was the first president, was a milestone in formalizing the promotion of research into the history of women in Ireland, forging a network of scholars in Irish women’s history and promoting public engagement with women’s history in an Irish context. The association’s bibliography, with a dedicated section on education, remains an immensely valuable resource for historians of women’s education.

Margaret MacCurtain, Mary O’Dowd, and Maria Luddy’s “An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500-1900,” published in 1992, was a landmark study that interrogated the current state of the field, identified frontiers for future research, and mapped out a research framework for scholars. Critical of the existing corpus of scholarship, MacCurtain, O’Dowd, and Luddy argued that “the predominant methodology of Irish historiography is not only unsympathetic to incorporating the history of women, but by its very nature excludes women.”Footnote 7 A Directory of Sources for Women’s History in Ireland, published in 1999, brought the potential for research in women’s history to a new level, inspiring and supporting the proliferation of a body of work on gender and social history in particular, including in the area of higher education.Footnote 8

“A Field for Their Efforts”Footnote 9: Claiming an Access Point

Eisenmann notes that “when historiography of a field is young, as it is with the importance of considering gender in the history of education, access frequently, even sensibly, organises the initial story.”Footnote 10 And while Eisenmann, like Goodman and Martin, points to the limitations of access as a framework for interpreting women’s educational history, it has nonetheless provided an important foundation for scholars to build on and to examine more complex issues or “border crossings.”Footnote 11

Denied access to universities until the latter half of the nineteenth century, women in England and Ireland, mirroring international trends, first attended single-sex women’s colleges, which were established in the mid-nineteenth century to provide women with an academic education in an all-female setting.Footnote 12 These colleges, many doubling up as elite secondary schools, promoted the study of a rigorous academic curriculum, in an effort to bring the education of females in line with that of males. They also stressed the importance of participation in the public examination arena, success in which meant the acquisition of valuable cultural capital that could in turn be transferred to the field of employment.Footnote 13 Highly significant in opening up higher education to middle-class women, these elite schools and colleges did little, however, to democratize the higher educational landscape in real terms, to some extent consolidating the privilege of a minority of middle-class women.

Before Emily Davies opened her College for Women in 1869, there had been no institution in England through which a woman could receive a public qualification beyond the secondary school level. By the 1880s, Girton and Newnham (1871) had developed into full-fledged women’s colleges at Cambridge. The pioneering Oxford colleges were Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville (1879), St. Hugh’s (1886), and St. Hilda’s (1893). Oxbridge women attended lectures, took examinations, and gained honors in those examinations, but they were not allowed to matriculate (become full members of the University) or to graduate until 1920 (Oxford) and 1948 (Cambridge). Women were admitted to the degree programmes of the University of London in 1878 and to all of the degrees except medicine of Victoria University (a federation of colleges in Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester) in 1881.Footnote 14 Gradually, universities across England opened up their degrees to women students, with the pace of progress most rapid at the newer civic or “redbrick” universities and university colleges.

Women’s engagement with higher education accelerated from the 1890s with the setting up of teacher training colleges and, from 1910, the provision of grants for prospective schoolteachers. Whereas middle-class men scorned the idea of teacher training, this was less true of their female counterparts in search of professional status.Footnote 15 Ambitions to make teaching a graduate profession shaped a shifting historical landscape contemporaneous with a desire to incorporate herstory. In 1960s England, the introduction of degree-level education courses brought disciplinary dispositions and historical sensibilities to the fore. Hence the first calls for the creation of the English History of Education Society, which would be launched in 1967, came from historians driving curriculum construction in the teacher training colleges and university departments of education.Footnote 16 Looking back, Ruth Watts recalled that women were not obviously on the margins when she attended her first Society conference in 1976, though few were keynote speakers and “there was little about women in the history itself except in the meetings of the Women’s Education Study Group where Carol Dyhouse, June Purvis, Penny Summerfield and Gaby Weiner were all dominant.”Footnote 17

Closely influenced by developments in England, women’s colleges emerged in Ireland in the late 1850s, predominantly out of urban, Protestant quarters, and typically led by middle-class women who were already active in suffrage and wider philanthropic work.Footnote 18 The pioneering colleges for Protestant women were the Ladies’ Collegiate School (1859)—which later became Victoria College, Belfast (1887)—and Alexandra College Dublin (1866). Colleges for Catholic women emerged in the 1880s, largely as a result of a perceived threat of proselytism, and as a result of the demands of middle-class Catholic women for higher education within a Catholic setting.Footnote 19

As Harford has demonstrated, the Irish context for the opening of university education to women mirrored the English and saw universities allow partial, controlled admission to women beginning in the late 1880s.Footnote 20 Women gained access to the Royal University of Ireland in 1879, to the Queen’s Colleges in the 1880s, and to Trinity College Dublin in 1904. The opening of universities to women in Britain and the growing strength of the women’s lobby internationally meant that by 1908 the National University of Ireland, with constituent colleges University College Cork, Dublin, and Galway, as well as Queen’s University Belfast, had no alternative but to open their doors to women on equal terms with men. Mirroring the Oxbridge model, Trinity College Dublin, as Parkes has illustrated, imposed more significant restrictions than the newer universities, which included a ban on women residing on campus and a requirement that they leave by 6 p.m. each evening. These regulations remained official until the 1960s, although by then they were less actively policed. Women were expected to “dress soberly,” use separate offices and dining facilities, and were not recognized as full members of the college until 1968.Footnote 21

Teaching became the primary occupation for female graduates, and while sexual stereotyping and gendered occupational structures significantly shaped women’s experience of teaching, it also provided a platform from which they could extend the reach of their social and cultural capital, assuming key leadership roles in education and in wider public life.Footnote 22 Teaching as a profession for women remains an under-researched field, although a growing body of scholarship is emerging in this area, including a focus on the experience of women as teachers, notwithstanding the complexity of experience as a category of analysis.Footnote 23

“Lock Up Your Libraries”Footnote 24: A Gendered Curriculum

Power dynamics embedded in educational systems reproduce gender inequalities, through curriculum content, pedagogical methods, and institutional structures. Gaby Weiner’s research was pioneering in exposing the ways in which the curriculum, imbued with cultural, historical, and political ideologies, defined and regulated gender norms.Footnote 25 The work of June Purvis was also significant in exposing how a middle-class ideology, which promoted the home as the natural sphere of woman, shaped the form and content of education for all women.Footnote 26 Similarly, Jane Martin’s scholarship has been instrumental in revealing how curriculum design often hid behind the guise of common sense yet was shaped by class-based, cultural, and patriarchal power structures.Footnote 27

Rosemary Deem studied sociology at the University of Leicester in the late 1960s. Looking back, she described the gendered politics of that knowledge space as follows: “The tiers were theoretical sociology (regarded as high status, difficult and a masculine preserve), empirical sociology (of medium status and difficulty, with no particular gendered appeal) and applied sociology, which was generally regarded as being of somewhat lower status, although essential for would-be social workers and female-dominated.”Footnote 28 These distinctions show a connection between curricula, inculcation of social attitudes, and employment opportunities, in keeping with the priorities Weiner identified.

Scholars in the Irish context have explored how the curriculum reflected the broader societal norms of patriarchy and was, at various intervals, shaped by the norms and values of the imperial power, the dominance of the Catholic Church, and the influence of cultural nationalism. Early women activists frequently employed the argument that an enhanced curriculum for girls and women would make them better mothers and companions of men. Margaret Byers, principal of Victoria College Belfast, suggested that reform of higher education had produced “its most important effect” in the contribution it had made to family life.Footnote 29 St Angela, the magazine of St. Angela’s College, operating under the auspices of the Ursuline Order, noted that “Dressmaking, Cookery and Laundry are universally considered three of the most essential items in the education of the modern girl.”Footnote 30 An education in subjects deemed appropriate for girls and women, as well as an emphasis on cultured elegance and refinement, remained the hallmarks of a conventual education.Footnote 31

A considerable body of scholarship has examined the development of a gendered ideology in the early decades of the Free State, which afforded women subordinate status within a deeply hierarchical social fabric and church structure.Footnote 32 This includes a focus on the curriculum of the Catholic teacher training colleges, which promoted a gendered ideology and culture of femininity, mirroring the conservative, nationalistic, and ultramontane agenda of post-Independence Ireland.Footnote 33 Scholars have also examined the dominance exercised by the Catholic Church in the organizational culture of schools, including its suppression of a sex education curriculum, part of its wider agenda to regulate sexuality, in particular female sexuality.Footnote 34

A “Woman-Centered University”?Footnote 35: Changing Institutional Presence

Women’s eventual admission to universities at the turn of the century was accompanied by sophisticated control frameworks aimed at minimizing their institutional presence and safeguarding the dominant male hegemony.Footnote 36 While the older universities were more likely to impose gendered constraints, in reality many of the new co-educational universities also imposed their own gendered ideologies.Footnote 37

Unlike in England, the single-sex women’s colleges model did not survive the advent of co-education in Ireland. Margaret Byers cautioned in her testimony before the Robertson Commission on University Education (1902) that women would be “crushed out of higher appointments” in any move toward co-education.Footnote 38 She also argued for the importance of “women taught by women.” In executing leadership roles within single-sex women’s colleges, women could exercise influence and create intellectual communities from within. Operating on the peripheries of men’s scholarly worlds and under the watchful eye of the male gaze, their capacity to foster cultural change was restricted, yet their status as academics and higher education leaders was arguably enhanced.

A number of scholars have turned to biography as a lens through which to interrogate the institutional presence of women as students and particularly as academics. Inspired by the cultural and linguistic turns, the biographical turn positions human experience at the axis of historical interpretation, a way to map and explain the connections between the gender order and educational, family, and work lives, as Martin observes in her collective biography of six twentieth-century women historians.Footnote 39 Nonetheless, as Purvis observes, biographical scholarship has for the most part focused principally on white, middle-class women.Footnote 40

In her analysis of the social history of higher education, gender, and institutional change, Dyhouse explores changing patterns of student aspiration, expectation, and experience. Like the majority of feminist historians, her focus is primarily on the experience of women students, which, she notes “reverses the emphasis found in many works on the history of education which focus primarily on the male.”Footnote 41

Harford has examined the experience of women academics in the early decades of co-education in Ireland, building on the work of Fitzgerald in the Australian and New Zealand contexts.Footnote 42 Her work examines the ambivalent status of women professors as beneficiaries of the gendered benevolence of university administrators who recognized the need to hire women to manage the influx of female students. While their insider status enabled them to advance a feminist agenda, their gender, and often their disciplinary expertise, ensured they remained on the fringes of men’s scholarly worlds.

Being Educated “with a View to Action”Footnote 43: Networks in the History of Women’s Education

It is impossible to trace the development of higher education as a social institution and the patterns of gender differentiation within academia without giving attention to networks—mapping personal histories alongside social, political and cultural analysis of intellectual fields. Networks of relatives, friends, mentors, or associates, both national and transnational, connected and advanced women’s interests as well as the exchange of ideas. They also provided women with emotional support, fostering solidarity and building understanding.

A considerable body of scholarship has examined the role and impact networks in the realm of education and beyond, and notions of professional community for women in the period 1850-2000.Footnote 44 This was the case with Maxine Berg’s work on the first women economic historians in England, for instance, which showed the important of personal relations and of the scholarly partnerships and institutions connections running through Cambridge University, the London School of Economics, and the newly founded Economic History Society. Similarly, in her work on women in science, Ruth Watts mapped and explained the significance of female scholars, assessing their numbers, their social and intellectual backgrounds and connections, their research, and their students.Footnote 45 Recent work stimulated by the 2021 film The Dig, based on the Sutton Hoo excavations in England, has turned up surprising revelations on the role of women in 1930s archaeology, mapping and explaining their contributions and thereby integrating women in the disciplinary history of this field.Footnote 46

Looking forward, we advocate a focus on networks and networking activity, to map and explain the flow of ideas, logic, and representation with regard to women staff and students, the history of women’s ongoing efforts, intellectual interventions (articles, books, interviews, research reports), social relations, and performance. We commend the application of prosopographical analysis, or collective biography, to document the personal side of the networks and structures through which women operated, the dissemination of ideas and practices, and the interrelation of social action and collective endeavor.

Progress and Prejudice? The Changing Experience of Women in Higher Education

Asymmetrical relationships of power have historically defined and indeed continue to define women’s experience of higher education.Footnote 47 Writing in a special issue of the History of Education Quarterly in 2024, A.J. Angulo and Jack Schneider observed: “In a time of contestation and upheaval, it is more essential than ever to understand the past.”Footnote 48 We echo this call, making a special plea for a continued focus on the subject of continuities and difference in women’s experience of higher education, acknowledging that gender is only one axis in a range of wider inequalities that operate across higher education. In so doing, we urge—in addition to the shifts and interventions in theory and methodology presented above—that history of education scholars have an ongoing conversation with the wider fields of social and cultural history, focusing on topics like the history of the emotions in order to construct intimate histories of gender.

References

1 Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, “Beyond ‘Misbehaviour’: Sally Alexander in Conversation,” History Workshop Online, March 11, 2020, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/feminism/beyond-misbehaviour/; Mary Stott, Before I Go: Reflections on My Life and Times (Virago, 1985), 24.

2 Sebag-Montefiore, “Beyond ‘Misbehavior.’”

3 Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England (Routledge, 1981); Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939 (Routledge, 1995).

4 Perry Williams, “Pioneer Women Students at Cambridge, 1869-81,” in Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850-1950, ed. Felicity Hunt (Basil Blackwell, 1987): 171-91; Jane Martin, Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian England (Leicester University Press, 1999), 5.

5 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (Dec. 1986), 1053-75; Jane Robinson, Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education (Viking, 2009); Stephanie Spencer, “Educational Administration, History and’Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 42, no. 2 (May 2010), 107.

6 Mary Cullen, ed., Girls Don’t Do Honours: Irish Women in Education in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Women’s Education Bureau, 1987), 1. Two chapters in particular in this book laid the foundation for future research in the history of women’s education: Anne V. O’Connor, “The Revolution in Girls’ Secondary Education in Ireland, 1860-1910,” 31-54; and Eibhlin Breathnach “Charting New Waters: Women’s Experience in Higher Education, 1879-1908,” 55-78.

7 Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd, “An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500-1900: Part I: 1500-1800,” Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 109 (May 1992), 1-19, 4; Maria Luddy, “An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500-1900: Part II: 1800-1900,” Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 109 (May 1992), 19-37. Marking thirty years since the publication, in 2022 Frances Nolan and Bronagh McShane edited a special issue of Irish Historical Studies titled “A New Agenda for Women’s and Gender History in Ireland.” See Irish Historical Studies 46, no. 170 (Nov. 2022).

8 Diane Urquhart et al., A Directory of Sources for Women’s History in Ireland, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1999. Updated in 2022 and now freely and publicly available, it remains the only detailed all-island listing of archival-based documents relating to the history of women in Ireland. See https://irishmanuscripts.ie/womenshistorysources/.

9 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London, 1847), 92.

10 Linda Eisenmann, “Creating a Framework for Interpreting US Women’s Educational History: Lessons from Historical Lexicography,” History of Education 30, no. 5 (Sept. 2001), 455.

11 Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin, “Breaking Boundaries: Gender Politics and the Experience of Education,” History of Education 29, no. 5 (Sept. 2000), 383-88; Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (Routledge, 1992).

12 Margaret Birney Vickery, Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social History of Women’s Colleges in Late Victorian England (University of Delaware Press, 1999); Maria Tamboukou, “Of Other Spaces: Women’s Colleges at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century in the UK,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 7, no. 3 (Sept. 2000), 247-63; Sarah Wiggins, “Gendered Spaces and Political Identity: Debating Societies in English Women’s Colleges, 1890-1914,” Women’s History Review 18, no. 5 (2009), 737-52; Judith Harford, “The Movement for the Higher Education of Women in Ireland: Gender Equality or Denominational Rivalry?,” History of Education 34, no. 5 (Sept. 2005), 473-92; Judith Harford, “An Experiment in the Development of Social Networks for Women: Women’s Colleges in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 3 (June 2007), 365–81. See also Judith Harford and Maria Luddy, “Education, Access and Attainment,” in Diane Urquhart and Lindsey Earner-Byrne, eds., The Handbook of Irish Women’s History (forthcoming from Routledge).

13 Andrea Jacobs, “Examinations as Cultural Capital for the Victorian Schoolgirl: ‘Thinking’ with Bourdieu,” Women’s History Review 16, no. 2 (April 2007): 245-61.

14 Joyce Senders Pedersen, “The Reform of Women’s Secondary and Higher Education: Institutional Change and Social Values in Mid and Late Victorian England,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring 1979), 61-91; Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?

15 Miriam E. David, The State, The Family and Education (Routledge, 1980), 124-25.

16 David Bradshaw, “The History of Education Society: Its Prehistory, Foundation and Early Years,” History of Education Researcher 90 (2012), 79-81.

17 Ruth Watts, “Gendering the Story: Change in the History of Education,” History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005), 226.

18 Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

19 Run principally by the Dominican, Loreto, and Ursuline orders, the most prominent Catholic women’s colleges were the Dominican College Eccles Street, Dublin (1882), St. Angela’s College and High School, Cork (1887), St Mary’s University College, Dublin (1893), and Loreto College, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin (1893).

20 Judith Harford, The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2008); Judith Harford, “The Admission of Women to the National University of Ireland,” Education Research and Perspectives 35, no. 2 (2008), 44-56; Judith Harford, “‘Words Importing the Masculine Includes Females’: Women at University College Dublin in the First Decade,” in Education in Ireland: Challenge and Change, ed. Sheelagh Drudy (Gill and McMillan, 2009), 24-34; Judith Harford, “Tracing the Contours of the History of Higher Education for Women in Ireland: Competing Discourses and Dominant Themes,” Encounters in the Theory and History of Education 24 (2023). See also Susan M. Parkes, A Danger to the Men? A History of Women in Trinity College Dublin, 1904-2004 (Lilliput Press, 2004); Susan M. Parkes and Judith Harford, “Women and Higher Education in Ireland,” in Female Education in Ireland, 1700-1900: Minerva or Madonna?, ed. Deirdre Raftery and Susan M. Parkes (Irish Academic Press, 2007), 105-44; Deirdre Raftery, Judith Harford, and Susan M. Parkes, “Mapping the Terrain of Female Education in Ireland, 1830-1910,” Gender and Education 22, no. 5 (Sept. 2010), 565-78; Senia Pašeta, “Women in the National University of Ireland,” in The National University of Ireland, 1908-2008: Centenary Essays (UCD Press, 2008), 19-32; Senia Pašeta, “‘Another Class’? Women’s Higher Education in Ireland, 1870-1909,” in Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland, ed. Fintan Lane (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 176-93; Laura Kelly, “‘The Turning Point in the Whole Struggle’: The Admission of Women to the King and Queen’s College of Physicians in Ireland,” Women’s History Review 22, no. 1 (Feb. 2013), 97-125; and Aoife O’Leary McNeice, “Bored Bluestockings and Frivolous Flirts: Dynamics of Gender and the Experiences of the First Female Students of Queen’s College Cork, 1879-1910,” Irish Studies Review 28, no. 4 (Oct. 2020), 445-62.

21 Parkes, A Danger to the Men?

22 Judith Harford, “The Gendering of Diaspora: Irish American Women Teachers and Political Activism,” Gender and Education 34, no. 1 (2022), 112-28.

23 Maria Luddy and Judith Harford are currently writing a history of women in primary teaching in nineteenth-century Ireland. See also Úna Ní Bhroiméil, “‘Sending Gossoons to Be Made Oul’ Mollies Of’: Rule 127(b) and the Feminisation of Teaching in Ireland,” Irish Educational Studies 25, no. 1 (March 2006), 35-51; Jennifer Redmond and Judith Harford, “One Man One Job: The Marriage Ban and the Employment of Women Teachers in Irish Primary Schools,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (Oct. 2010), 639-54; Judith Harford and Jennifer Redmond, “‘I Am Amazed at How Easily We Accepted It’: The Marriage Ban, Teaching and Ideologies of Womanhood in Post-Independence Ireland,” Gender and Education 33, no. 2 (2021), 186-201; and Judith Harford and Áine Hyland, “Becoming Women Teachers: Gender and Primary Teacher Training in Ireland, 1922-1974.” History of Education 52, no. 6 (2023), 888-904.

24 Virgina Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth, 1929), 76.

25 Gaby Weiner, Feminisms in Education: An Introduction (Open University Press, 1994).

26 June Purvis, “Towards a History of Women’s Education in Nineteenth Century Britain: A Sociological Analysis,” Westminster Studies in Education 4, no. 1 (1981), 45-79; June Purvis, Hard Lessons: The Lives and Education of Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England (University of Minnesota Press, 1989); June Purvis, ed., Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction (UCL Press, 1995).

27 Jane Martin, Gender and Education in England Since 1770: A Social and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

28 Rosemary Deem, “Border Territories: A Journey Through Sociology, Education and Women’s Studies,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 17, no. 1 (1996): 7.

29 Royal Commission on University Education in Ireland. Third Report of the Commissioners (London House of Commons, 1902), 61.

30 Magazine of St. Angela’s College, May 1920, 5, Ursuline Archives, Cork.

31 Mary Hatfield and Ciaran O’Neill, “Education and Empowerment: Cosmopolitan Education and Irish Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Gender & History 30, no. 1 (March 2018), 93-109; Deirdre Raftery, Teresa Ball and Loreto Education: Convents and the Colonial World, 1794-1875 (Four Courts Press, 2022).

32 Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society (UCD Press, 1987); Caitriona Beaumont, “Women, Citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922-1948,” Women’s History Review 6, no. 4 (1997), 563-85; Maria Luddy, “Sex and the Single Girl in 1920s and 1930s Ireland,” Irish Review 35 (Summer 2007), 79-91; Clara Fischer, “Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (Summer 2016), 821-43.

Judith Harford and Tom O’Donoghue, “‘An Ireland of Brave, Manly Boys, an Ireland of Pure, Modest Girls’: The Education System and the Regulation of Sexuality in Ireland, 1922-1968,” History of Education (forthcoming).

33 Dónal O’Donoghue, “‘Speak and Act in a Manly Fashion’: The Role of the Body in the Construction of Men and Masculinity in Primary Teacher Education in Ireland,” Irish Journal of Sociology 14, no 2 (Dec. 2005), 231-53; Úna Ní Bhroiméil, “Images and Icons: Female Teachers’ Representations of Self and Self-Control in 1920s Ireland,” History of Education Review 37, no. 1 (June 2008), 4-15; Judith Harford and Tom O’Donoghue, “Challenging the Dominant Church Hegemony in Times of Risk and Promise: Carysfort Women Resist,” Gender and Education 33, no. 3 (2020), 372-84; Harford and Hyland, “Becoming Women Teachers.”

34 Luddy, “Sex and the Single Girl in 1920s and 1930s Ireland”; Maria Luddy, “Unmarried Mothers in Ireland, 1880-1973,” Women’s History Review 20, no. 1 (Feb. 2011), 109-26; Leanne McCormick, Regulating Sexuality: Women in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2009); Diane Urquhart, “Virtuous Mothers and Dutiful Wives: The Politics of Sexuality in the Irish Free State,” in Gender and Power in Irish History, ed. Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (Irish Academic Press 2009), 100-114; Diane Urquhart, “Gender, Family and Sexuality in Ulster, 1800-2000,” in Ulster Since 1600: Politics, Economy, and Society, ed. Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw (Oxford University Press, 2013), 245-59; Jennifer Redmond et al., eds., Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2015); Tom O’Donoghue and Judith Harford, Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922-67 (Oxford University Press, 2021).

35 Adrienne Rich, “Toward a Woman-Centered University, 1973-1974,” in Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (W. W. Norton, 1980).

36 Tanya Fitzgerald and Judith Harford, “Life Threads: Reading the Professional Lives of Mary Hayden (1862-1942) and Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877-1965),” History of Education 50, no. 4 (2021), 485-500.

37 Parkes, A Danger to the Men?; Harford, “Words Importing the Masculine Includes Females,”; Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?; Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

38 Robertson Commission, Appendix to the Third Report (1902), 63. The Robertson Commission was established in 1901 in an effort to find an acceptable solution to the university question.

39 Jane Martin, “Intellectual Portraits: Politics, Professions and Identity in Twentieth-Century England,” History of Education 43, no. 6 (Nov. 2014), 740-67.

40 June Purvis, “‘A Glass Half Full’? Women’s History in the UK,” Women’s History Review 27, no. 1 (2018), 88-108.

41 Carol Dyhouse, Students: A Gendered History (Routledge, 2006).

42 Judith Harford, “The Historiography of the Professoriate: Reflections on the Role and Legacy of Professor Mary Hayden (1862-1942),” Paedagogica Historica 56, no. 6 (2020), 807-18. See, for example, Tanya Fitzgerald, Outsiders or Equals? Women Professors at the University of New Zealand, 1911-1961 (Peter Lang, 2009).

43 Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 3 (London, 1837), 227.

44 Joyce Goodman, “Languages of Female Colonial Authority: The Educational Network of the Ladies Committee of the British and Foreign School Society, 1813-1837,” Compare 30, no. 1 (March 2000), 7-19; Ruth Watts, “Some Radical Educational Networks of the Late Eighteenth Century and Their Influence,” History of Education 27, no. 1 (March 1998), 1-14; Jane Rendall, “Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827-91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925),” in Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), 136-70; Sarah Richardson, “‘Well-Neighboured Houses’: The Political Networks of Elite Women, 1780-1860,” in Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Macmillan Press, 2000), 56-73; Jane Martin, “Entering the Public Arena: The Female Members of the London School Board, 1870‐1904,” History of Education 22, no. 3 (Sept. 1993), 225-40; Judith Harford, “An Experiment in the Development of Social Networks for Women: Women’s Colleges in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 3 (June 2007), 365-81; Susan M. Parkes, “Intellectual Women: Irish Women at Cambridge, 1875-1904,” in Knowing Their Place? The Intellectual and Professional Life of Women in 19th-Century Ireland, ed. Brendan Walsh (The History Press, 2014), 96-127; Judith Harford, “Women’s Education Networks: The Role of the Central Association of Irish Schoolmistresses and the Woman’s Education Association, Boston in Advancing the Cause for Women’s Admission to Trinity College Dublin and Harvard University,” Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 5 (2018), 626-42; Judith Harford and Keith Murphy, “Leading in the Academy: Women Science Professors at University College Dublin in the 1960s,” Paedagogica Historica 59, no. 6 (2023), 1234-48.

45 Maxine Berg, “The First Women Economic Historians,” Economic History Review 45, no. 2 (May 1992), 308-29; Ruth Watts, Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History (Routledge, 2007).

46 Rachel Pope and Mairi H. Davies, “Peggy Piggott: Women and British Archaeology (1930-1945),” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 42, no. 3 (June 2023), 256-79.

47 Kay Fuller and Judith Harford, eds., Gender and Leadership in Education: Women Achieving Against the Odds (Peter Lang, 2016).

48 A. J. Angulo and Jack Schneider, “Forum on Future Directions for History of Education,” History of Education Quarterly 64, no. 3 (August 2024), 346.